Lacking, but maybe grieving, too, the truth.
I do not speak to my dad.
For all the internal conversation about it, the trying to be fair to a person I thought I knew, the "why" is not special. It's the same story you've heard a billion times, but now you'll want to know it because I've said too much. My dad is an alcoholic, and probably has been for one whole and one-half of a lifetime. And three little lifetimes. But this story is not about why I do not speak to my dad, but how I speak to my own children about how I feel about that.
"Do you have a Dad?" My eight-year-old asks over the dinner table. Her older brother and sister are quiet, and self-consciously grinning, as if waiting for me to deliver a punch line that involves them. They all look at me. My husband looks hard at his dinner.
"Yes."
"Well, do you know him?" She's trying to figure this out.
"Of course, I know him." The last time I saw him, you were hours old. He came to our hospital room unannounced and took you out of the bassinet to hold you. Like it was his right. He was drunk, and what I learned later was that he had been fired for punching his boss in the face.
"Did he die?"
"No, honey." Well, sort of. I used to pick up my phone to call him and tell him some mundane thing. And then I would remember we don't speak, and why we don't speak, and put the phone down. I don't do that anymore, but you do that with dead people, too, right? Most of the time, I am just relieved that the suffering is over and we've all moved on. This "missing" is like waiting for the other shoe to drop. Like cancer or something.
"Well, I don't remember him." Yes. It's all about you, dear.
That was unfair.
"Honey, what you need to know is that he is alive and loves you very much, even though he doesn't live with Gamma anymore.”
The truth is that I remember him. Or some version of him that he wanted me to know. It is not all about me, but I feel duped, embarrassed, shown up. All in the verb sense, as if these are things he did to me. I carried water for this actor, for this story, for this legend, and all along, he knew the play. He let me defend it. I wonder if being this person he wasn’t, for so long, was the reason; like he was faking it for so long, hoping to make it, but he missed. He lost it.
Scintillating inner conversation. So original.
But the missing is original. To me. I miss having a parent, someone in charge. Now I understand that someone is me, which of course is part of growing up.
She eats some broccoli; considers things. Normally, her brother and sister cannot abide her uttering complete sentences without interrupting her to the point of driving her to, well . . . But, they are quiet. They are thirsty to know more about this negative space. They all prepare, making room for the answer to the next question.
I await the logical, and obvious: “Why, Mom?”
But it never comes. She goes back to eating, having tested this limit. She is satisfied for now.
I know that I will not be so lucky soon. Nature, families; we abhor a vacuum. They will want to know. And I will have to figure out what to tell them. A few thoughts:
“Adults sometimes have disagreements.” Lame. They’re too smart for this.
“Sometimes people say things they don’t mean. Sometimes they say exactly what they mean.” Vague. Like, what?
“I don’t speak to my dad because we had a fight so terrible that, even though we both are painfully sorry, there were words said that can never, ever be taken back.” Scary. Like, if I misstep, will Mom do that to me?
I foresee a conversation with our middle child, my son, in the mid-range future, when he is a teenager, driving a car. It will involve a cautionary tale of alcohol use and its myriad destructive ways. To drive home the point, I will personalize the story graphically and intentionally, in a way that I hope is dramatic enough for him to understand that we do not get behind the wheel after drinking. Ever.
I will lay it on thick.
But, then the legend grows and mutates. And I exploit the story so that his side is missing. I will justify this play. I will tell myself that I will use him and what he took to keep my children safe from all this nonsense. I will do whatever I have to do to ensure they do not know this lack. Childish, yes.
But, I am no longer a child. I have quit looking around for someone to be in charge. It’s me; it’s my responsibility. But, I was a child once, and I do not want to forget all of that. I was someone’s child once. Children will fill a void with the thing they know best: themselves. Even when a thing does not begin with them, children think that they can end it, or fix it, or repair it. They think they can fit that missing piece. I do not want my children looking to complete me.
Failing the fix, I’ll just close the door on that thing and never deal with it again. Or, until the next dinner time. In the meanwhile, my prayer is that my children will not judge so harshly as their mother judged her father.
A Big, Ugly, Slick-Haired Yeller Dog
"A boy, before he really grows up, is pretty much like a wild animal. He can get the wits scared clear out of him today and by tomorrow have forgotten all about it."
A man, though, cannot forget.
Growth is not the heartache between boy and man; it's the remembering.
Dear Grandma,
Starting at the end, what you need to know is that you were feverish, discontent. You fought.
Some old people are ready to die. They have outlived their parents, siblings, spouses, friends; children, sometimes. They are no longer beautiful or needed. They soil themselves and, if they are lucky, hired strangers clean them up. If not, their sons or daughters do so. They forget. They repeat. They sleep. They feel each day that they are a chore or a task for another human being to complete. Look in on Mom today. Check. Tell the family Mr. Smith needs new sweatpants. Check.
No one wants to be prioritized before “pay the bills,” and after “get groceries,” and so some accept death. They are ready and fearless. Maybe they are wise about it, or maybe they are mean about it, but they accept it.
You did not accept. You were neither wise nor mean, at the end. By the time we all met on July 3 to say our goodbyes to you at the ICU, your brain and your heart had been torn asunder worse than my parents’ marriage. Your brain just checked out, and your heart limped along with support from various machines. My mother later would have to reconcile both of those bodily functions to a common end by way of “pulling the plug,” which is really more like pushing buttons. Even after the last machine was switched off, you fought for two more days.
Almost all of your grandchildren met to say goodbye. Our parents made us.
“Why is she so hot?” I asked a young nurse. As usual, I probably was clinical, bordering on cold, and definitely already creating checklists to handle the people and the probate that would come in the next few days and months. I feel like you would have approved. Meanwhile the youngest of my cousins behaved in hysterics that you would have abhorred: crying, carrying on as if in a soap opera or novel. They were selfish in that ignorant and non-pejorative way that only very young adults who have done nothing with their lives yet can be. They were a little tacky (flip- flops-on-the-plane-tacky), and I think you would have hated that.
I do not remember the young nurse’s specific answer, but I remember that it sounded fatuous. I wasn’t listening, or I didn’t think the nurse was old enough even to have an opinion, this being the first time in my life that I was older in years than a medical professional. In any event, you were hot, and writhing and agitated; irritated maybe. So irritated that I nearly expected you to get up and curse the young nurse. Or to get up and curse us all for standing around so uselessly and just looking at you. Good grief, why doesn’t someone just handle this?
My cousins talked to you. Out loud. The speeches seemed self-serving. My cousins knew a different woman than I did. They were younger, and met you at a different time in your life, when you really were solely a grandmother. I knew you when you were that, but also, still a wife. I knew you when you were still a mother to teen-aged children who lived at home; when your opinion still mattered to my own mother, and my aunts and uncles. I knew you when you worked, had a job at the bakery, somewhere to go each day. I knew you when you were, “Grandma,” but by the time my cousins knew you, they had changed your name to, “Omi,” a derivative of Oma.
My cousins made silly comments, sniffled through not-so-choked-back sobs, that belonged more at the back of an eighth-grade yearbook than in an ICU cubby with three walls, a curtain, and 10 grown and growing grandchildren: “I’ll never forget you, or your homemade applesauce!” Or, melodramatically, “It’s ok, Omi. (Pause for dramatic effect.) You can go.”
It was not ok with you. You thrashed so hard, you knocked your blanket and hospital gown aside. The silly nurse clucked patronizingly at you; that your thrashing had knocked loose one of your IV lines. Meanwhile, my cousins play-acted what grief should look like and sound like and be like. I held your hand, but said nothing.
After bit, I had had enough wallowing. The nurses had things to do, and we were due to meet our parents for supper. I think someone made a joke to you about who was your favorite – I do think you would have liked that. Everyone laughed, then we left. I didn’t cry because you were not in that room, and hadn’t been with us for a long time. It’s funny, though, because I openly wept this past Mother’s Day, when one of those cousins emailed me a picture of your 60-year-old peonies, pink and in bloom. Because you are there.
I rode with a cousin in her new Jeep to meet our parents. I kept thinking about an article my college roommate’s mother had emailed to all of us when we had just graduated from undergrad. It was something Oprah-inspired, in which the advice for young women was, if attacked in a dark parking garage, fight. Draw attention to the predicament. No attacker wants to make a scene. Above all, do not let them take you to another location. If they have a gun, run fast and in a zig-zag formation, because chances are, they aren’t trained marksmen. Fight for your life.
All I know is that you fought. For your whole life. You were the strongest woman I ever knew and I wish we had more time to talk about how you got that way.
I found some of your old fabric squares. Looks as if you were beginning quilt. I have started finishing it for you. I will write more to update.
Love you,
Stef